Holocaust memoir a hoax; publisher withdraws book

A man whose memoir about his experience during the Holocaust was to have been published in February has admitted that his story was embellished, and on Saturday evening his publisher canceled the release of the book.

And, once again, a New York publisher and Oprah Winfrey were among those fooled by a too-good-to-be-true story.

This time, it was the tale of Herman Rosenblat, who said he first met his wife while he was a child imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp and she, disguised as a Christian farm girl, tossed apples over the camp's fence to him. He said they met again on a blind date 12 years after the end of war in Coney Island and married, celebrating their 50th anniversary earlier this year.

Winfrey, who hosted Rosenblat and his wife, Roma Radzicki, on her show twice, called their romance “the single greatest love story” she had encountered in her 22 years on the show. On Saturday night, after learning from Rosenblat's agent that the author had confessed that the story was fabricated, Berkley Books canceled the book and demanded that Rosenblat return his advance.

Berkley, a unit of Penguin Group, was planning to publish “Angel at the Fence,” Rosenblat's memoir of surviving in Schlieben, a sub-camp of the Buchenwald concentration camp, with the help of Radzicki.

Harris Salomon, who is producing a movie based on the story, said he would go ahead with the film, but as a work of fiction, adding that Rosenblat had agreed to donate all earnings from the film to Holocaust survivor charities.

Another unit of Penguin, Riverhead Books, was duped this year by Margaret Seltzer, the author of “Love and Consequences,” her fabricated gang memoir about her life as a white girl taken into an African-American foster home in South-Central Los Angeles. She had in fact been raised by her biological family in a well-to-do section of the San Fernando Valley.

This latest literary hoax is likely to raise yet more questions as to why the publishing industry has such a poor track record of fact-checking.

In the latest instance, no one at Berkley questioned the central truth of Rosenblat's story until last week, said Andrea Hurst, his agent. Neither Leslie Gelbman, president and publisher of Berkley, nor Natalee Rosenstein, Rosenblat's editor at Berkley, returned calls or e-mail messages seeking comment. In an e-mail message, a spokesman for Winfrey also declined to comment.

After several scholars and family members attacked Rosenblat's story in articles last week in The New Republic, Rosenblat confessed Saturday to Hurst and to Salomon that he had concocted the core of his tale.

In a statement released through his agent, Rosenblat wrote that he had once been shot during a robbery and that while he was recovering in the hospital, “my mother came to me in a dream and said that I must tell my story so that my grandchildren would know of our survival from the Holocaust.”

He said that after the incident he began to write. “I wanted to bring happiness to people, to remind them not to hate, but to love and tolerate all people,” he wrote in the statement. “I brought good feelings to a lot of people and I brought hope to many. My motivation was to make good in this world. In my dreams, Roma will always throw me an apple, but I now know it is only a dream.”